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Comment by rprasad | Hacker News Reader

Flipping burgers at McDonalds is a good way to get your foot in the door if you work at it. Shift managers can make $50-75k, and location managers frequently top $100k. Given the high rates of turnover, such positions can be earned in 2-3 years (for college graduates).

Moreover, McDonalds has an extremely generous education assistance program, including full-ride scholarships to business schools for employees who qualify for its executive training program. A high percentage of McDonald's executives are promoted from within. And like Dominos, a vast majority of McDonald's franchises (which clear >$1 million/year, on average) are owned by former employees. (Don't remember what the % is for McDs, but for Dominos, their pizza box claims >95% of their franchises are owned by former employees.)

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When I worked at Hardees (mid-90s, but inflation hasn't been so high since then), I happened to see my shift manager's paycheck. She was making like $20k/year.

Perhaps shift managers can make $50-75k, but I'd be surprised if it's common. If you have a reference that shows otherwise, I would be very curious to see it.

I did specify "McDonalds" for a reason. McDonalds has always had great employee relations. In-n-out is even better than McD's in this regard, but the total opportunity for growth is limited because of the smaller footprint.

Hardees (Carl's Junior in the west) is almost the polar opposite of McDonalds. Its founder was a vocal opponent of labor laws, and for a while in the 1990s was one of the principal financial backers of the effort to repeal the minimum wage and overtime laws.

I don't know what shift managers you know, but the ones I know don't pull much more then what the standard employee gets.

I know/knew shift managers in the Los Angeles area (Downtown, South Central, Beverly Hills/Century City/Westwood, and West LA), Oakland/Berkely, Cleveland/East Cleveland, and Atlanta.

They make good money, especially considering that many of them never went to college and some did not finish high school. A lot of them have been promoted into restaurant or regional manager positions.

Salaries at the managerial level start of lockstep but quickly become merit-based, that is, in order to earn substantially more than a standard employee, they must prove that they are substantially higher performing than a standard employee (in the managerial sense, not on an hours basis). A good manager is like a multiplier on his/her employees' work output, so the salaries for managers generally reflect the multiplier they generate.

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